Panel posts final Benghazi report; no new blame for Clinton in pages, but agencies hit on security, response

“This is not about one person,” Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Benghazi Committee, said Tuesday, speaking of Hillary Clinton.
“This is not about one person,” Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Benghazi Committee, said Tuesday, speaking of Hillary Clinton.

WASHINGTON -- The House Benghazi Committee issued its final report Tuesday, faulting President Barack Obama's administration for lax security and a slow response to the deadly 2012 attacks at the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Libya.

But the committee's 800-page report, released by Republican members, offered no new allegations about the role of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The attacks, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, have been cited by Republicans as a serious failure by the administration and by Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Democrats have accused the committee's Republican majority of targeting Clinton.

The report from the two-year, $7 million investigation included few new details about the night of the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks, but it delivered a rebuke of government agencies such as the Defense Department, the CIA and the State Department for failing to grasp the security risks in Benghazi and for maintaining outposts that they could not protect.

The report also criticizes government officials for their subsequent explanation to the American people.

Eight hours after the two assaults began, "Not a single wheel of a single U.S. [military] asset had turned toward Libya," Rep. Trey Gowdy, the panel's chairman, said at a Capitol Hill news conference. "Think about that for a second."

He said military leaders told the committee that they thought an evacuation was imminent, slowing any response.

The report did not dispute that U.S. military forces stationed in Europe could not have reached Benghazi in time to rescue the Americans who died -- a central finding of previous inquiries.

Still, the panel criticized the overall delay in response and the lack of preparedness on the part of the government.

"The assets ultimately deployed by the Defense Department in response to the Benghazi attacks were not positioned to arrive before the final lethal attack," the committee wrote. "The fact that this is true does not mitigate the question of why the world's most powerful military was not positioned to respond."

The committee interviewed more than 100 witnesses and reviewed about 75,000 pages of documents. The most prominent witness was Clinton, who appeared before the committee in October.

The report is not final until the full committee formally votes to accept it, which is expected as early as July 8. Still, some changes are possible if they are accepted and approved by a majority vote.

Two of the committee's conservative members, Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mike Pompeo of Kansas, wrote a 48-page addendum including harsher criticism of the Obama administration.

"Officials at the State Department, including Secretary Clinton, learned almost in real time that the attack in Benghazi was a terrorist attack," Jordan and Pompeo wrote. "With the presidential election just 56 days away, rather than tell the American people the truth and increase the risk of losing an election, the administration told one story privately and a different story publicly."

Pompeo called Clinton's actions in the wake of the attacks "morally reprehensible," and he and Jordan said her public comments about the attacks differed sharply from her private assessments to members of her family and diplomats from other countries.

"Secretary Clinton failed to lead," Pompeo and Jordan wrote. "She missed the last, clear chance to protect her people."

The State Department also issued a statement Tuesday, saying the "essential facts" of the attacks "have been known for some time" and have been the subject of numerous reviews, including one by an independent review board.

Spokesman Mark Toner said the department had implemented most of the recommendations of the independent review board and was continuing to expand security at its facilities and improve its threat assessment.

Democrats respond

Committee Democrats released their own report Monday saying that while the State Department's security measures in Benghazi that night were "woefully inadequate," Clinton never personally turned down a request for additional security. Democrats said the military could not have done anything differently that night to save the lives of the Americans.

Democrats have called the investigation a partisan witch hunt, and Gowdy and his Democratic counterparts on the committee -- led by Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings -- often clashed over witness interviews and testimony.

On Tuesday, the panel's Democrats denounced the Republicans' report as "a conspiracy theory on steroids -- bringing back long-debunked allegations with no credible evidence whatsoever." The statement added: "Republicans promised a process and report that was fair and bipartisan, but this is exactly the opposite."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which released its own report in 2014, said the report was "blatantly political," "squandered $7 million of taxpayer funds," and "diverted significant Defense Department, State Department and intelligence community resources."

"And what do we have to show for it?" Feinstein said. "Yet another report that finds no wrongdoing by Secretary Clinton."

Gowdy defended the lengthy and expansive investigation, saying it was intended to reveal the facts and not to torpedo Clinton's presidential chances.

The South Carolina Republican -- a former federal prosecutor -- insisted that former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and current Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., never "asked me to do anything about presidential politics" when the panel was formed in May 2014.

"My job is to report facts," Gowdy told reporters. "You can draw whatever conclusions you want to draw."

Gowdy said he was not prepared to pass judgment on Clinton, adding that opinions about her do not appear in the actual report.

"This is not about one person," he said.

Republican insistence that the investigation was not politically motivated was undermined last year when House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., suggested that the House committee could take credit for Clinton's then-slumping poll numbers. The remark contributed to McCarthy's failure to win election to House speaker.

Speaking at a campaign event in Denver, Clinton said Tuesday that the report "found nothing, nothing to contradict" the findings of earlier investigations.

"I'll leave it to others to characterize this report, but I think it's pretty clear it's time to move on," Clinton told reporters.

Clinton noted her lengthy testimony before the panel last year, adding: "We owe it to those brave Americans to make sure we learn the right lessons from this tragedy."

Information for this article was contributed by Matthew Daly, Matthew Lee, Nicholas Riccardi and Ken Thomas of The Associated Press; and by Karoun Demirjian of The Washington Post; and by David M. Herszenhorn and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times.

A Section on 06/29/2016

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